Keeping it in perspective

During my lifetime I have been in situations where ideas were presented and either my folks, my employers, or the members of the organization with which I was associated wanted to study a proposal or implement it with the plan to review it in three to six months. Many times when my brother or I came up with a request to do something our folks would simply delay the decision for a few days whilst they “thought about it.”

That makes perfect sense to me and many of us in this nation. For some reason there are others who cannot comprehend the idea of a government, charged with the responsibility of protecting its citizens from attack and harm, to simply put a temporary hold on some applicants’ requests to enter this country.

Those who happen to oppose this 90-day temporary ban, from seven countries that are a concern for the homeland security folks, were upset from the first second they heard of the ban. It isn’t anti-Muslim but concern that some terrorists may slip inside our nation. While I am no fan of Donald Trump, his administration did not identify those seven nations as the hot spots. The Barack Obama administration came up with that list. Where the Trump folks messed up from the start is how the executive action was carried out during its first few hours. Frankly I see both sides of the issue on that mess.

The administration was afraid to announce the starting time as terrorists might take advantage of the window of opportunity to come in before the sanctions were implemented. Certainly the people in line at foreign airports, or worse, already on the airplane heading to the United States got caught up in the red tape.

Let’s keep it in perspective as 325,000 people arrived in the USA from outside our nation and a total of 109 individuals were detained for a few or even many hours. Two were deported from what I have heard, and the others were cleared within a 24-hour period at the worst. I have little patience and would have been ticked with any delay because after arriving at an airport you just want to get to your destination. That being said; the administration is taking very seriously their role in the safety of the USA, and given that 324,891 people were not delayed as the new procedure was rolled out shows that the TSA and feds did a fairly good job. I have heard that the government is looking into what caused those delays for the 109 folks caught up in the mess.

If delaying 109 visitors to our shores even for 24 hours keeps us much safer I don’t have a real problem with it. It is not a constitutional violation because people living in foreign countries coming to visit here have no constitutional guarantee of getting to visit because they are not citizens.

My next area of concern for this past week comes from the boorish behavior of the students and faculty of UC Berkeley. It is a shame that those students/protestors do not understand that the First Amendment is there to protect the right of people to speak about ideas which other people find to be wrong. We need the First Amendment to hear the dissenters and the majority opinions for the discussion to occur.

Nobody was forcing anyone to attend the lecture in question. The protestors demonstrated that violent free speech seems to trump a calmly delivered message in a college auditorium. It is fascinating that the former hotbed of liberal thinking and free speech now engages in Nazi-esque tactics to silence those with whom they disagree, and they were lauded by many in tinsel town and on the mainstream media outlets.

Conservative students trying to attend that presentation were assaulted verbally and physically, and fires were set along with thousands of dollars of damage done to our publicly-supported university. It is apparent that the campus police were directed to “stand down” because there was only one arrest made. Only one.

Getting back to the open borders concept, I would like to see those who are calling for the open borders without vetting or proper identification to try to walk into Diane Feinstein’s office while she is in the room. Try walking into Jerry Brown’s Sacramento office without ID. Try getting into the Hollywood celebrity country clubs without ID and you will see how you are treated. Trust me on one issue, should you try to enter those places without authorization; you will see that those anti-Second Amendment groupies have armed protection while they want to restrict your ownership.

As I write this column a judge’s order stopping the enforcement of this executive action by the White House is in place. That liberal-minded jurist has placed us all at risk and I hope it isn’t any of our families that suffer from his action.